Current Progress on Ancillary Tasks

I am currently working on my website & Digipak. I have decided to use my original idea of having young boys posing as the band when they were younger (in line with the bands ethos / music video 'blast from the past' theme), for the website & inner compartments of my digi-pak, yet for my front & back cover create a more controversial array of imagery to encase the indie-rock lifestyle & musical outlook. My postmodernist approach aimed to play around with meaning of music & the contemporary hedonistic 'rock' scene, by using intertextual imagery, in order to entice a wider audience towards out product. By creating a bricolage of images I wanted to combine a diverse range of contrasting photographs & graphology in order to create a new overall image which could connote 'indie'. 

By placing flowers next to skeletons i aimed to blur the conventions of this genre, I didn't want my audience to be posed with one set idea about 'Suburban Typo's' music & attitudes and wished them to engage with the band & want to read into their story, by creating their own meanings from what those pictures denote to them. I merged high culture - a head of the queen, with popular culture - an edited graphic image of John Lennons eyes, in order to create an incongruous collage which would sell a band which i could make as extreme / famous / alternative as i wished to - being fictional. I aimed for my work to be stylistic & though it draws upon postmodern values & reflects the irony of our music video, at the same time relies upon encasing the indie subculture through the use of semiotics. 

As for my web design i have been experimenting with different typography for most of my working sessions recently, I have found that this feature is the catalyst for success with an adequate band website (as well as all of the conventional features). The site 'Wix' which i have been using to create my website is quite limited in its font choices, which has made the creative elements of this part of the course much harder. I have had to source particular text types i found aesthetically pleasing & cut and paste them, then strip them of a back drop, and upload them separately as images in order to conform to the conventions of indie band sites. For example on the 'Two Door Cinema Club' & 'The Vaccines' websites, they both use emboldened, upper case fonts to create an edgy, hard-hitting, bold image for their bands. Thus i copied this text style onto my site to hope to achieve a similar effect for 'Suburban Typo'. I used this style of font on all on my merchandising products & pages of my website in order to create coherence & use this simple design as a sort of "logo" which can be easily connected to this specific musical genre.

  

Having somebody try out my website a week or so ago has made the navigational choices so much easier, in that when creating the site I have relied upon my own abilities to journey through my personal work & hadn't previously taken into account the difficulties my structure could pose for external users. Thus I have aimed throughout to be aware of spacial features & make my articles as spread out as possible in order to create an easy, effortless website experience. 'The Vaccines' band site uses an all white back drop & Red / black fonts. Their merge of monochromatic imagery & the powerful red really encases the feel of their music & thus i felt it was vital to follow through with similar colour choices. However I did decide not to make all of my images black & white as they did, as I felt it would be a bit predictable and i aimed for my site to be filtered with vibrance & create a festival like, indie feel, which i felt would be very difficult to create with bleak colouring. 

 http://efrase2314.wix.com/suburbantypo = WEBSITE.